


Void Lore

by Kedreeva Originals (Kedreeva)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Horror, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Surreal horror, The Void, Void Creatures, void
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 02:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13649967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kedreeva/pseuds/Kedreeva%20Originals
Summary: A collection of lore from the Void, as told by... well. That is the question, isn't it?





	1. Advice to New Arrivals

 

* * *

 

 

            In the Void, nothing is alive. Some things are living, but it is not the same. They may move and breathe, and some even have a beating heart, sometimes three or four, but this is not an indication of life.

            Be wary of what you touch- there are things as hungry for your life as the chill of the universe is for the heat of your small, human body. These things would consume you and be unable to tell the difference.

            Not everything in the Void will keep you or consume you, however. Some of them do not care if you stay or go. Some of them want you out- they may even help you live or leave.

            Most of them want to use you; be wary of these last, there are many uses for a human in the Void. Few of those uses will leave you whole, though most will leave you alive. Try not to think about the overlap between the two.

 

* * *

 

            There are mechanical things in the Void. Some of them are comprised of wood or paper or other plant matter, some from metal or stone. Some of them hobble the Void on legs made of someone else’s sinew and bones, clockwork hearts click-whirring inside of leather wrapped bodies.

            At some time in the past, they had a purpose- some of them still do. Try to avoid those ones; nothing with a purpose in the Void has ever meant anything good for a human. 

            After all, Void only becomes Void at the end, and the bones have to come from somewhere.

 

* * *

 

            There are patches of utter silence. Sometimes you will walk into them. Sometimes they will walk into you. You cannot tell where they are, or when they will arrive, or how long before it ends, only that you cannot make or hear any sound at all, not even the beat of your own heart in your ears.

            You will learn the meaning of the phrase  _the silence is deafening_.

 

* * *

 

            While it is true that the Void is mostly made of how you perceive it, there are blind spots to human perception when your brain seizes and cannot create a lie for you any longer. It happens inside of holes in the fabric of unreality. If you are not careful, or if you are too careful, you may find yourself in one.

            Inside, the Void may be seen for what it truly is- a squirming, writhing mass of insatiable darkness, eager to consume everything it touches. Remember, if you find the light again, that the holes are not the only places this aspect of the Void exists. The Void is always such a thing, all around you at every moment draining vitality, warping you into itself piece by piece by piece.

            The difference, in these dark patches of truth, is that you can see it.

 

* * *

 

            Those fortunate enough to reach the water’s edge often find that there is no such thing as water. Rolling fields of grasses in amber and violet and rust, fields that pitch and fall like the oceans of home, rushes whispering against the hull of a ship, bowing to scrape at the shore like waves. It sounds almost the same- if you close your eyes, you might fool yourself it is.

            If you close your eyes, you might not open them again.

            If you do open them, you might find you wish you hadn’t, but you might also find your guide has arrived. Until it moves it will look like an island made of old leather, stitched together or maybe rotting at the seams. It knows where you are going. You get only one chance to follow it, and it will not wait for you if you hesitate or lag or stop. Once you have lost sight of the shore, the only way back is to follow the rise and fall of your guide’s long spine as it swims through the endless rushes. The sea must run deep, to conceal something so huge, but you can touch the bottom. You will think it’s the bottom anyway.

            Keep going no matter what- it will take an eternity. It will take no time at all. You will reach the other side in the middle, someday.

            Don’t look back. You won’t be the only one following something.

 

* * *

 

            Do not go near the screaming rocks.

            They have not always screamed.

 

* * *

 

            There are soft spots. There are spots where the barrier between your world and the Void have thinned under assaults of tooth and claw as it tries to reach us. They are not always in the same spots, they do not always have the same effects.

            Sometimes, the darkness can only see us, but sometimes, something from the other side slips through. Sometimes humans see it- a long necked monster in the depths of a loch, a lurching figure deep in the woods, an eerie presence in an empty house - and sometimes not. Sometimes it only alters what is in your world, warping it into something twisted.

            Other times, things from your world stumble into theirs. It changes them. Objects no longer behave as they should; breathing and moving and consumed by the same hunger as the rest of the Void. The creatures are worse, changing in ways that cannot be seen, gaining an eerie stillness as the Void hooks puppet strings into them. It will use them.

            Never trust anything normal in the Void. It is a lure, and you are a fish that thinks it looks an awful lot like something you know.

            Beware.

 

* * *

 

            Tallow birds are not plentiful in the Void. They are what is sometimes left behind when the Void consumes a human, and humans are scarce enough already. In another place they might be named ghosts, but in such a shifting world they are corporeal. They cannot change. They resent this.

            They sound like sizzling butter in a hot pan and smell like the tang of a fresh arterial wound. You will know them by the color of their feathers, the sickly yellow-white of rendered fat, often streaked with rusty brown the color of stale blood. They remember being human, they remember being destroyed, and they resent this, too. They will not help Void denizens.

            But they will help you, if they find you. Look for them. Take whatever they give you without question. Thank them, but do not wish them well, do not wish them peace- that is a cruelty they do not deserve.

            They are your only ally.

 

* * *

 

            Do not try to find a map. There are no maps of the Void, or at least none which are accurate beyond the drawing of them. Nothing in the Void is ever in the same place for long. Maybe the core of it, if such a thing exists. It doesn’t, most days.

            That is not to say a way cannot be found. Some places, some landmarks, are usually relative to others. The mirror flats bleed into the Crystalspine forests. The screaming rocks are always in the southern desert, even if the southern desert is not always in the south, even if south doesn’t usually exist. Traveling left in the howling wood will always lead to the golden plains. You’ll wish it didn’t, but there’s no way back- going right in the golden plains could lead anywhere.

            No one travels the Void trying to get somewhere. You travel the Void until it arrives where you need to be, if you have managed to survive that long. A map won’t save you.

            Good luck. You'll need it.


	2. The Vortex

            At the core of the Void - not the center, but the core of it - there is a great, yawning vortex. Some call it the core of the Void itself, or the heart, if the Void could have such a thing. Whether it is a power source or a power drain has never been determined for sure.

            Its tendrils swirl in both directions, causing it to always look as though it sinks away and toward those viewing it. Light bends and whirls around the pitch center, dragged ever toward the middle in the manner of a black hole, but the Vortex does not pull. It is a twisting, squirming, writhing thing which does not move at all, starving to fill itself with everything it touches.

            It is never the same twice, or at least, no story about it matches another quite right. Some say the Vortex can fit in the palm of a human hand. Some say you cannot see one side of it while looking at the other, no matter how far back from it you stand.  It howls, and is silence; either way it consumes all noise it does not create. Its tendrils are blue, or red, or green, or any other color depending on who is looking. It will not be the same color the next time.

            If you have ever been inside of a thundercloud during a lightning storm, you may recognize the electric sensation of charged air. If you have ever stood next to a lightning strike, you may recognize the click of the ground beneath your feet as it waits to connect to the sky. The Vortex is both of the moment before and the moment after, connecting each part of the Void to every other part the way thunder connects to lightning. The pull of the Vortex is what moves all parts of the Void, gives it an ever-shifting landscape.

            The Vortex is a place of infinite ending and creation. All that which the Vortex consumes or spits out becomes a part of the Void. All that the Vortex spits out, it will eventually consume again. It maintains the endless cycle of the Void.

            If you ever intend to leave the Void, you would do best never to visit the Vortex.


	3. The Crystalspine Forests

            Further into the Void, or further out of it, are the Crystalspine forests. Depending on where you reach them from, there are eight of them, seven on nights a new moon would shine if it existed there. Twelve if you are unlucky. Mostly there are eight, and no one counts, just to be sure.

            Some say that the Crystalspine forests are proof that the Void is collapsing in on itself. They say that it is endless and infinite and dying. They say that the Void was bigger, once - if such a thing may be said of a place which would dizzy an ouroboros - and that it was once filled with creatures so immense as to be unfathomable. The Crystalspine forests are what is left of them, the faceted, shimmering bones of denizens long gone.

            They are not as long gone as some would have you believe, but it takes time to grow to that size. The behemoths which wander those forests are their descendants, a hatch from so long ago in the future that none left remember their advent.

            They are made of the same crystal as their forests, their legs so similar to the trunks they walk amongst that they are often mistaken as inanimate when they fall still. In each of their bellies twists a burning core, a small sun- this is where the light in the forests comes from. Stick to the shadows, for once. The cores will burn blue or purple, except in the fifth forest- their cores are orange or green or sometimes black, if they were built instead of born. Avoid those ones. It’s better you do not know why.

            Do not look up while in any of their forests, or you will find a maw full of obsidian-shard teeth stretching down, surrounded by ten thousand jaundiced eyes, all fixed upon you. It is too late then. Do not run- there is nowhere to go. Do not look away. Do not blink.

            Answer its questions. As long as the eyes are yellow you will be ok. Red is dead. Void-black is worse. If you answer wrong, you will know it by the eyes.

            You will know it briefly, anyway.


	4. The Golden Plains

            The golden plains are not so called from the color of the dusty soil or the tanned bleach of the plants that used to grow there, that sometimes grow there still if you are looking the right way. They are not golden from the sun, or the star it calls sun, or the brightness that suffuses the air like a fog, cloying and sharp and cold.

            The golden plains are so called because of the beasts that run it, with fur spun of golden thread and cloven hooves and long, golden jaws. Their beauty is unmatched, muscles moving like liquid gold, brilliant hides catching the light like shimmering fish. They travel endlessly and without rest, gathering in herds that consume those of their number that fall from exhaustion.

            Once you have heard their shrieking, it does not go away until you have left the plains. That is the good news.

            The bad news is, you cannot hear their shrieking until you can see them. By then, it is too late.

 

* * *

 

 

            Along the north side of the Golden Plains, or what is usually the north, runs a river of molten rock and blue flame. What you find across the river is a toss up on any given day. The vast majority of the time, it leads to the Wastes, though sometimes it is the third Crystalspine forest or the edge of the Mirror Flats. Sometimes it is just the Golden Plains again, but from a different direction.

            Should you want to cross the river, watch it before you try. Looks for the eddies that swirl the surface from time to time. Avoid those. Be aware that the surface flows faster than the underneath, but that the underneath will drag travelers to the bottom. It is not the current that does the dragging, but try not to worry too much about what else is down there. You will burn up long before you puzzle out what’s gotten hold of you.


	5. The Mirror Flats

            From their shore, the mirror flats look very much like an endless expanse of clear, perfectly-calm water, reflecting the space above flawlessly. For those who rely on vision to navigate, the effect quickly becomes disorienting, the world above and below exactly the same. This disorientation is the easiest way to reach the underneath, if you seek to go there, and the easiest way to be lost to the underneath, if not.

            Almost nothing else exists within the mirror flats. Not landmarks nor structures, nor flora nor fauna. No water wells from the ground, and no wind stirs the air. not even debris, brought from other places, mars the mirror-like surface of the flats. The flats are not made of glass or metal, nor water or salt or any substance a human might recognize. It is said the flats could hold the weight of all of the behemoths of old, and yet the unwary traveler may slip through the surface.

            Traveling the flats is a gamble at best, and a poor decision in any circumstance. Once you are out sight of the shore, any direction is as good as any other- it is surrounded completely by the mirror bog, where shards of the flats break off to travel the bog, sentient and hungry. You cannot follow them- the mirror bog may only be reached through the second crystalspine forest, after all. Any shore you might reach is random until you set foot upon it. Every shore you might reach takes seven days to travel to, if you reach a shore at all.

            If the flats are kind, then you may encounter their only denizens. Twisters, small, coiling creatures with sail-like frills and no eyes, inhabit the air above the flats, watching over those who attempt to make a crossing. Once you have passed out of view of the shore, they may come to you, and you may request their assistance, their guidance, for the right offering. If you happen to have what they desire, they will lead you to the shore you need in exchange.

            If you do not have what they desire, well. The flats are not necessarily kind to  _you_.


	6. The Mimic Woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mirror wraiths originally submitted by Serendipityxii

            There are worse places within the Void than the Mimic Woods, although this largely depends upon the sort of person you are when you go in. It won’t be the same sort of person you are when you leave. It might not be the same person at all, if you are not very, very careful.

            Those that enter the Mimic Woods find themselves slowly followed. Piece by piece, refuse from the old, gnarled trees will begin to coalesce into shambling, silent forms. They will look approximately like you, or at least, parts of them will look like you, or like others that once upon a time had your shape. Sometimes they will look like only parts of you. Sometimes only parts of others. There may be parts you do not recognize. There will be too many, or too few. Nothing will move quite right; you will want to run. Trust that instinct.

            They are mostly harmless if you do not stop moving. There will be more of them, the longer you stay. They will stop looking like you, eventually. Or maybe you will stop looking like you, and they won’t know any better. Maybe you never looked any different in the first place.

            You will be mostly harmless the next time someone enters, as long as they don’t stop moving.

 

* * *

 

 

            Farther into the Mimic Woods lie the mirror wraiths, creatures which wandered in from the mirror flats covered in silver. They reflect the forest and the sun and the truth, if you get close enough to see yourself in their hides. Do not let them catch your reflection, for once they have hold of you, they never let you go. You will be lost to the possibilities they show you in your own reflection.

            The face that looks back at you will be your own, but it will not be you. It will be the worst of you. It will be the side that takes the last bite of shared food, and drives too angrily in bad traffic. It will be the side that shouts what you have always only whispered on the inside. It will be the side spattered in blood when you have lost your temper.

 

            You will want to turn away. You will want to close your eyes. You will feel the warmth of phantom blood drip down your skin in sticky trickles, the way it does in the mirror, and you will long to scrub it off until you don't, anymore. The longer you look, the less horrific the reflection seems. The longer you look, the less substantial you will feel.

            If you can look away, you will be safe again. Most people cannot make themselves turn away from watching everything they wish they could do roll out like a movie before their eyes. You will want to watch, eventually, and it will play, and play, and play.

            And eventually, you will watch it walk away from you. The silver from its pelt will coat your skin, liquid at first, and then hardening into smooth, flat mirror. You will find yourself pounding, frantic and terrified, against glass that was never there before, but you will be on the wrong side of the mirror by then. The mirror wraith will walk away wearing your face.

            If it is any consolation, you were never meant to leave the Void anyway.

 

 


	7. The Mirror Bog

            To one side of the second Crystalspine Forest lies the Mirror Bog. It is never the same side, but it is also never the north side, when north exists. You can only get to it from within the second Crystalspine Forest, which is fortunate, all things considered. Do not wander the Mirror Bog. You only have so many steps. The number is different for everyone.

            Unlike the bogs of your world, this one is not made of peat and sluggish water and biting insects. This bog is made of shards of reality, liquid and sharp and reflective, like a churning layer of crushed mirror. You may ignore the shadows you see pass beneath and through the bog’s surface- your own should not leave you to join them unless you have offended it.

            The scraggly trees that reach gnarled hands to the sky have no substance- they are merely a reflection of something that has never existed. They will call you to them, soft songs that will sound like the gentle rattle of wind through summer leaves they never had. Do not touch them, and do not attempt to shelter under them. Their roots are hungry.

            There is a way out, if you are careful enough to count your steps.

            At the center of the bog lies a dock, attached to nothing and leading nowhere. If you manage to reach it before the whispers find you, climb onto it at the middle. Walk to the end, and step off. If you have chosen the correct end, you will find yourself on a small, wooden boat. Probably wooden. At any rate, it will take you out of the bog. This may or may not be a blessing, depending on where it takes you.

            If you are incorrect… well. Perhaps you had best choose correctly.


	8. The Wastes

            Along every border of the Wastes can be found Revenants.

            Like everything in the Void, they are not alive, but unlike most, they are not living, either. They do not breathe, they have no beating hearts, and - also unlike most things in the Void - they do not eat. They are blind and deaf and mute, stumbling out from within the Wastes to wander until they lose cohesion.

            Touch is their only sense, and they crave to gain the others. They are made of the hollows between the elements they have collected, twisted sticks and bleached-white bones and gnarled debris from the Wastes cobbled together to vaguely resemble something mobile.

            Do not touch them. A single touch will alert them to your presence.

            The bones they wear did not start out as bones alone.

 

* * *

 

 

            Deep in the wastes and always in the distance, roam the vortex deer, great stags towering over the land, jagged antlers disappearing into the fog above the wastes. They travel slowly, or appear to, though each step covers a hundred meters of void-eaten ground. Their travel makes no noise, leaves no impressions in the soil.

            This is not surprising. Many speculate they do not even have hooves with which to touch the ground, though none have gotten close enough to find out for sure. The closer one gets to a vortex deer, the less it looks like a deer, and the more it looks like a howling vortex. For once, your eyes will not deceive you; this is how they hunt, transforming into lashing winds that grab up and dissolve everything in their path.

            However, like the leviathans and the behemoths of old, vortex deer have no care for mortals one way or another. On the one hand, this means they will not hunt you. On the other, it means they will not notice if they travel in your direction. They will not notice when they consume you.


	9. Leech Lillies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Submitted by Serendipityxxi

            In the void there are vast fields of black lilies, they grow tall and soft, dark and soothing. The wary might feel a shiver down their spine imagining what might hide in their rich depths. You’ve never seen lilies quite this color. They are vibrant, not a matte aether black, but velvety soft with deep purple tints. These are Leech Lilies. Should you walk into a field of these all the terror you were feeling will level out, tone down to scared after a few minutes, tone down to anxious a few minutes after that.

            Soon you might wonder what you were worried about to begin with. The flowers take their opulent hue from the emotions siphoned off of hapless travelers. At first it’s great, all that terror, all that anger, all that grief, it’s gone, seeped painlessly away. If you linger too long you may find it’s all gone, all the happy memories don’t matter any more, the hard punch of jealously no longer affects you.

            Even leaving the field doesn’t help. You’re not upset, you’re not even a little bit bothered. There’s a nagging insistence at the back of your mind that something is missing. The idea might tickle you that it’s in the field. So you go back and you hunt and you hunt and you don’t know what you’re even looking for. You only know it has to be here somewhere. It has to be.


	10. The Collectors

            The Void, like any place, has layers of existence. Beneath the surface of the Sea of Rushes lies the domain of the Collectors, creatures made of liquid sound and scattered light. They coalesce in caverns and pockets in the bedrock, reverberating until they dissipate again. Some of them know the way out of the Void, or a way anyhow. Some of them visit the human realm in the crack-boom of a lightning strike, gone again in an instant.

            Each Collector among the hundreds of them has their own space where their hoard is stashed. Some of them collect objects - bones and stones, left socks that fall through the cracks of a dryer’s reality, pen caps and chapsticks. Some of them collect creatures. Humans are prized, marked with runes that spell the Collector’s name, but they are not the only creatures ever collected.

            One of them collects leech lillies, draining out what the lillies have taken from the humans that have found them and collecting it in vials. Bottled fear and joy and anger. Bottled love. Bone-white lillies hang from every inch of the cavern ceiling, stretching down like cursed stalactites, long dead.

            This Collector I have met. They will trade travelers a way out of the Void, should you bring them a leech lilly for their collection. I would not advise it; the lillies are more likely to take you than you are to take one of them. The coin Collector is a safer bet, if you have a coin to trade. You will not land in your realm where you started, but you will usually land in one piece. The rest of the time I suppose it will not really matter where you land.


	11. The Behemoths and the Constructs

            I do not remember the time when the behemoths of old wandered the Void. Some do. Some remember. Moretta, who prowls the border lands. Salis, deep inside the first crystalspine forest, residing now among their shattered remains. The Collectors surely remember when the behemoths walked the Void- they probably remember the Void before the behemoths as well.

            What I know is that the Void used to be much bigger than it is now, infinite expanses of nothing, populated with eight crystal behemoths, or sometimes twelve, or seven. I have heard that you could not see one side of them while looking at the other. I have heard entire cities could have been built in a single eye socket, and that Ravener’s Ridge, the towering mountains that sometimes split the Void in two, is what remains of the tenth behemoth’s spine, and that the leviathan seas at the eastern edge formed from their footprints in soft soil.

            I used to wonder how anything so large could survive, what it ate, how it moved without collapsing on itself, but I think the Void was a less savage place in their time. Not pleasant, not kind, but not as hungry. Not as vicious. I cannot help but wonder if they existed because of that fact, or if it was like that because they existed. I suspect it was the latter.

            I am told the Void was not divided back then, not shattered and shifting, not splintered at its core. That the behemoths were able to wander infinity in slow, lumbering strides, and that communities of all sorts formed and fell below them, between one step and the next. They did not consume or create anything, but consumption and creation followed in their wake. Moretta says that when the constructs brought the behemoths to the ground, creation ceased and the Void began to consume itself. I asked her, once, how something infinite could become smaller. I will spare you the answer.

            One of the Collectors will speak of the behemoth’s return, for the right price. I should not have paid it, but I needed the information. It told me that the behemoths that wander the crystalspines now will never stop growing. That, if the Void can contain the constructs within the fifth forest, behemoths will once again freely travel the Void. It told me not to hold my breath, as if it mattered whether I did, because the Unraveller would not allow this to pass, that he would find a way to outwit the Void and release his creations once again.

            A long time ago, I would not have believed the Collector, but I have seen the small constructs now. I have witnessed a loop gate snare a void beast. I have seen the rotting corpses of leviathan dragged to the shore of their seas.

            The behemoths were his first. They will not be his last.

 

* * *

 

            Deep in the fifth Crystalspine Forest, travelers may find the Constructs. 

            They are smaller than the behemoths of the other forests, but this makes them no less deadly. Powered by unspeakable means, the Constructs shamble on metal-and-glass legs through the crystallized ribs and spines and long bones of their flesh bearing ancestors. In their glass chests burn cores the colors of a dying sunset or a fresh cut lawn. Those who are very unlucky may find themselves hunted by the two whose cores burn black. They will not ask questions. They do not know the term mercy.

            A clever human might ask who made the Constructs, and the answer, for once, is simple- the Unraveller. A crafter, tinkerer, hunstman; he seeks to dismantle the Void, to control it or consume it, to make it his or to tear it to pieces. What does Void dissolve into, when it is gone?

            If stories may be believed, it was the Constructs that burned down the real forests that used to stand where the Crystalspines now lie. It was the Constructs that brought the ancestral behemoths to the ground and laid their bones clean to the suffusion of light that permeates the Void. Only the Void itself, contracting on the raw nerves the Constructs had exposed, was able to contain them, and only at great cost.

            Now the Constructs are confined to the fifth forest, trapped there by the ever-shifting boundaries of the Void. Make no mistake- they are waiting. They travel tirelessly through the forest looking for the edge, seeking to return to the being they still call master and consuming everything in their paths.

            Thankfully, the Constructs do not know that the Unraveller has abandoned them to their endless fate. When they eventually escape, they will realize it.

            What does Void dissolve into when it is gone?

            Someday, the Constructs will find out.


	12. The Unraveller

            Built by the Unraveller in his early days, loop gates are mechanical snares intended to trap those not afflicted by time. Or rather, those who are unaffected by its passage, those who shed time like water from skin not of any world.

            If you are quick, and if you are clever, you may use this construct as a defense against those that would pursue you, miring them in a loop of twisting, repeating time. Be careful not to enter the coils of the gate, yourself, or you will find yourself unstuck in time- an unpleasant experience for mortals.

            Should you successfully utilize a loop gate to trap a void beast, you should depart swiftly. Those that would pursue you are inevitably pursued in turn by the one who built the snare. He will arrive before long, to claim his trophy.


End file.
